Nullification and Fugitive Slave Laws

Nullification and Fugitive Slave Laws

Thomas Allen

No person held to service or labor in one state, under the laws thereof, escaping into another, shall, in consequence of any law or regulation therein, be discharged from such service or labor, but shall be delivered up on claim of the party to whom such service or labor may be due. (Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3 of the US Constitution)

When the States became members of the United States, they agreed to return fugitive slaves. As time passed and the Puritan Yankee abolitionists became highly influential in New England, New York, and the upper Midwest, the Northern States began refusing to aid in the return of runaway slaves. In other words, they began nullifying fugitive slave laws.

After the enactment of the Fugitive Slave Act of 1850, several Northern States effectively nullified it. (Presumably, Illinois and Indiana had no problem with the fugitive slave laws because they prohibited Blacks from entering them.)

Not unexpectedly, South Carolina objected to the nullifications. One reason that South Carolina gave for seceding was that various Northern States had nullified the fugitive slave laws. The reason that South Carolina listed slavery as a reason for its secession was that it was a prime example of the North’s hostility toward it and the North’s refusal to live by the Constitution.

Ironically, when South Carolina seceded, the Northern States no longer had a constitutional obligation to return runaway slaves to South Carolina. Thus, South Carolina’s secession effectively ended the need for the Northern States’ nullification, as far as South Carolina was concerned, because it was now a foreign country.

For South Carolina to secede to preserve slavery was absurd. Despite Northern States nullifying fugitive slave laws, slavery was better protected in the Union than outside it. Regardless of abolitionist rant, Republicans stressed that they had no intentions of abolishing slavery (see “Slavery Not the Reason” by Thomas Allen).

If South Carolina wanted to keep slavery intact, it would not accomplish that goal with secession. When it seceded, the United States ceased having any obligation to return runaway slaves to it.

Nevertheless, New England’s Puritanism, lust for plunder, and hatred of Southerners prevented them from letting South Carolina and the other Southern States leave the union in peace. The Yankee Puritans had seen the righteous, holy light, and they were determined to ram their vision of a sinless world down the throats of the Southern States despite the desiderata of the South. Puritans must free the world of sin so that Jesus can return — postmillennialism. (While the underlying principle of  postmillennialism is that the Holy Spirit becomes stronger, the underlying principle of today’s popular premillennialism is that the Holy Spirit becomes weaker.) Moreover, they would make the South pay for their liberation from sin by stealing as much wealth from the South as possible. (To the abolitionist Puritans, the greatest sin of all was slavery, despite the Bible not condemning slavery, which is why they abandoned the Bible.)

Jefferson, Madison, Calhoun, and most other proponents of nullification taught using it to void unconstitutional federal acts. Although Madison approved of nullifying constitutional federal acts that a State disliked, most of the others did not teach using it to void constitutional acts of the federal government that a State disliked.

According to Article IV, Section 2, Clause 3, which is quoted above, the Constitution authorized fugitive slave laws. Moreover, it obligated States to return runaway slaves. Consequently, Northern States nullified fugitive slave laws not because they were unconstitutional, but because they disagreed with them. (Since the Northern States controlled Congress, why did they not repeal the fugitive slave laws or rewrite them to address their concerns?)

Nevertheless, if a State disagrees with a federal law that is constitutional, it has the right not to participate in its enforcement. However, it has no right to actively intervene or interfere with its enforcement, as some Northern States did when they nullified fugitive slave laws. If the law was unconstitutional, which the fugitive slave laws were not, a State has the right to interfere with its enforcement.

If the Puritan Yankee abolitionists found slavery so reprehensible that they would destroy the country and its constitution and cause the loss of hundreds of thousands of lives in the process, they could have bought the slaves and set them free much more cheaply and without destroying the country and its constitution. These abolitionists cared only about Black slaves in the abstract. They did not care for them personally as did their owners.

Reconstruction showed how little Northerners cared about Blacks. They threw the slaves into the free-labor market. Most slaves had few skills beyond farm labor, and most had little training in taking care of themselves. Their masters had provided their housing, food, clothing, tools, medical care, etc., and took care of them in old age and when they were unable to work. After emancipation, they immediately had to learn to do all these things for themselves. Many failed, and many died.

Also, the North could have provided freed slaves with farmland in the territories. Yet, it did not because the territories were reserved for Whites.

Unfortunately, too many Blacks still have not escaped the slave mentality. Through various federal and State welfare and civil rights programs, they depend on governments to take care of them, as they had depended on the master — they have enslaved themselves to governments. Worse, they have enslaved taxpayers to support them.

During the Jim Crow Era, Blacks were making great strides in learning how to care for themselves and to free themselves from a slave mentality. Discrimination and segregation in the North and the South forced them to become independent and rely on themselves. Then came the Civil Rights Era. Consequently, this progress was retarded and thwarted.

Appendix. The Tenth Amendment Center

The Tenth Amendment Center (TAC) is a strong supporter of nullification. However, it goes beyond the teachings of Jefferson and Calhoun. While they wrote that a State has the right to nullify federal acts that it finds unconstitutional, as far as I know, they never promoted the nullification of constitutional acts with which a State disagrees. (When the Northern States nullified fugitive slave laws, they nullified constitutional laws with which they disagreed.) 

However, TAC goes beyond nullifying unconstitutional federal acts. It not only endorses a State nullifying unconstitutional federal acts but also endorses a State nullifying constitutional federal acts that it dislikes — except for Southern States nullifying civil rights acts of the federal government, including those that are unconstitutional, such as school desegregation and integration. (I have not found TAC expressly opposing or condemning the Southern States and communities attempting to nullify federal acts outlawing segregation and forcing integration. However, it does support Communist agents and Communist-front organizations nullifying State and local segregation laws and practices. Consequently, I infer that it opposes States and communities attempting to nullify these federal acts.) Thus, TAC supports Northern States' nullifying fugitive slave laws and opposes South Carolina's objection.

TAC seems to have a low opinion of Calhoun, despite him probably being the most brilliant and original political philosopher that the Western Hemisphere has ever produced, because he supported giving nullification real teeth. Calhoun argued that a State could prevent the enforcement of an unconstitutional federal law within its borders by vetoing it and thus making it unenforceable, as did Vermont’s nullification of the fugitive slave laws, which authorized arresting and penalizing federal officials attempting to enforce the fugitive slave laws. TAC objects to giving nullification teeth — at least in practice. Consequently, TAC rejects a State enforcing its nullification by jailing federal agents who attempt to enforce the nullified act in that State. In its opinion and Madison’s, such nullification allows one State to impose its will on the other States by preventing the enforcement of a nullified act within the nullifying State but not in the other States. Yet, TAC only weakly, if at all, objects to other States imposing their will on the nullifying State. In short, while Calhoun advocates nullification-heavy, TAC and Madison advocate nullification-light.

Copyright © 2025 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Old Morality – New Morality

Old Morality – New Morality

Thomas Allen

Before 1861, the old morality dominated the United States. The exception was the Puritan Yankee of New England and his colonies in New York and the Upper Midwest, which the radicals who fled Europe after the failed Revolution of 1848 reenforced, whom the new morality guided. Even before the arrival of the radicals, the Puritan Yankees were preaching the new morality.
The old morality is antebellum in nature. Under the old morality, the survival of one’s gene pool, i.e., one’s race (species), is of utmost importance. Accordingly, a person has mutual honor and respect for his people, i.e., its ethnicities and race. He has pride in and honor for his ancestors and sees a person, regardless of race, as a real person with real joys and sorrows and not as an incarnated spirit. Because race is highly important under the old morality, it perceives a person, whatever his race, as a concrete being. The old morality is a natural morality. It follows naturally from the bond between a mother and child, then the family, then the clan, then the nation (ethnicity), and finally the race, where it stops. Also, according to the old morality, Aryans wrote the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution for themselves and their White posterity and for no other. In short, the old morality preserves.
The new morality is postbellum in nature. Under the new morality, the survival of humanity is of utmost importance. Accordingly, a person is much more concerned with other people (races) than his own people. Thus, he is willing to sacrifice his own race for the benefit of other races. Moreover, he lacks pride in and honor for his ancestors, Most important, he looks at a person as an incarnated spiritual being and not as a real person, where all spiritual beings look alike, think alike, and act alike. Neither races nor male and female exist; races and the sexes are merely social constructs; they are chimeras. The new morality perceives people as an abstract being, no matter their race, which is irrelevant and even nonexistent. People heavily under the influence of the new morality do not respect a person with whom they disagree because such a person is not a citizen of humanity. The new morality is an unnatural morality. Also, according to the new morality, the Declaration of Independence and the US Constitution are propositions to spread equality and democracy throughout the world even if it means the extension of the Aryan. In short, the new morality destroys.
The new morality grew out of the abolitionist movement, which grew out of the Puritanism of New England. (Consequently, anyone who follows the new morality is fundamentally a Puritan Yankee.) By 1865, the new morality had gained control of the US government. (President Johnson was a notable holdout, who defended the old morality and was nearly impeached because of it.)
Following the end of the First Reconstruction, the dormant old morality came back to life. Although the progressivism of Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson grew out of the new morality, the old morality guided them and most other progressives from the latter part of the nineteenth century until after World War I. Unlike today’s progressives, during this era, most progressives placed the welfare of their race first. They did not consider the United States to be a multicultural, multiracial concept country.
After World War I, the new morality grew into the fascism of Franklin Roosevelt. During his administration, the new morality began to strengthen. Following World War II, it returned with vigor and ushered in the Second Reconstruction to destroy finally the Southern, who had revived around the turn of the century, and to elevate the Negro not only to equality with the White (Aryan) race, but to make him and all other nonwhites the Aryan’s superior.
By the end of Lyndon Johnson’s reign, the new morality dominated the country. (Ironically, the last major battle against the new morality was fought in Boston, the heart of the birthplace of the new morality, between 1974 and 1976. This was the last strong and violent battle fought over school integration. When the Bostonians were finally defeated, so was the old morality.)
Now, the new morality has metastasized into globalism, feminism, transgenderism, open borders and unlimited immigration, conservative nationalism, American libertarianism, the final destruction of the States as independent sovereigns, etc. While the new morality has grown to consume the country, the old morality has faded into insignificance. Rare is a White who openly preaches the old morality.
Today, only the Negro and other nonwhites practice the old morality. (Failure of Aryans to practice the old morality has doomed the American Negro, for once the Asian and Latin American Turanians reach critical mass, they will reduce the American Negro to insignificance.) Although the new morality is alien to the Negro and other nonwhites, they use it to their advantage to cower and eventually to annihilate the Aryan. Unlike the Aryan, who live by the new morality, they all place their race first.
Scarce are political, economic, social, or religious leaders or spokesmen who are not disciples of the new morality. Anyone who dares to preach the old morality is condemned, ostracized, attacked, and silenced. Thus, vocal proponents of the old morality are seldom heard.
Unfortunately, for the White race, the new morality has not stopped at the borders of the United States. It has spread to infect Europe, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, South Africa, the White countries of South American, and all Aryan outposts (Muslims of the Aryan race are the exception).
South Africa shows the lethality of the new morality. Here, it has driven the Whites of South Africa to suicide, as they have given their country to the Negro, who is now genociding the Whites — by that, showing his appreciation of the Aryan’s cowardly surrender. If the Aryan does not soon abandon the new morality and reinstitute the old morality, he will become an extinct species.
The following groups, Antifa and Black Lives Matters, illustrate the difference between the old morality and the new morality. Following the new morality, Antifa, most of whose members are Aryans, seeks to destroy everything White. On the other hand, Black Lives Matters, most of whose members are Negroes and who follow the old morality, place the Negro first and seeks to elevate the Negro to supremacy.
Today, although the new morality dominates most Aryans, a spark of the old morality smolders in many of them. (If an Aryan does not openly seek to preserve, protect, and promote the White race, including prohibiting nonwhites entering the country to become residents and prohibiting interracial mating, then the new morality controls him.) The new morality has completely consumed the progressive liberal, for no spark of the old morality glows in him. Moreover, the new morality has so consumed most libertarians that they show no spark of the old morality.
Some conservative commentators demonstrate people dominated by the new morality having a spark of the old morality. They protest derogatory remarks made against Aryans by progressive liberals, especially those made by people of color, nonwhites. Also, they protest discriminatory acts against Whites. Yet, about immigration, their objection is about the procedure and not about content or consequence. Most do not object to flooding the country with nonwhites; their objection is about the procedure used. If tens of millions of nonwhites enter the country legally, they have no objections. However, a few do disagree with allowing a massive number of nonwhites to enter the country. They do this not because they favor the Aryan, but because they do not favor him. To the contrary, they want to limit the immigration of nonwhites so that they can be easily assimilated and will not be encouraged to build enclaves to protect their ethnicity. Assimilation is a euphemism for amalgamation, i.e., interracial mating. Although a few conservative commentators may advise marrying within one’s race, none oppose miscegenation. Thus, as it consumes the Puritan Yankee and his descendant, the progressive liberal, the new morality consumes these conservative commentators. Consequently, like the Puritan Yankee, progressive liberal, and many libertarians, they consider the United States to be a propositional country and not a genetic nation. Contrary to their protest, these conservatives do not really care about the preservation, protection, or promotion of the White race — the old morality. (Or, does the fear of that great smear word “racist” cower them to the point that they no longer care about their race?)
In summary, the old morality is a natural morality that preserves, protects, and promotes one’s race. The new morality is an unnatural morality that leads to the destruction of the races, especially the Aryan race, as it is the only race stupid enough to practice it.

Copyright © 2019 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Failure of Puritanism

Mencken on the Failure of Puritanism

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes the failure of Puritanism, pages 177-186. Below is an overview of his discussion on the failure of Puritanism; my comments are in brackets.
    Mencken describes the action of Puritanism as follows: “Under the pressure of fanaticism, and with the mob complacently applauding the show, democratic law tends more and more to be grounded upon the maxim that every citizen is, by nature, a traitor, a libertine, and a scoundrel. In order to dissuade him from his evil-doing the police power is extended until it surpasses anything ever heard of in the oriental monarchies of antiquity.” [For example, ever more things said by a White, especially a White male, and even more so by a White Southern male, that might possibly hurt the feelings of a supersensitive person who is searching for someone to hurt his/her/its feelings is proscribed. If such words do not result in a jail sentence, as often happens in Europe, they certainly lead to expulsion from school and a loss of employment.] As a result, “it is almost a literal fact that the citizen has no rights that the police are bound to respect.” [One can hardly imagine Mencken’s disgust of the power that the police now have in America’s emerging police state where the police can often arrest a person for resisting arrest when the police have not charged the person with any crime.] Mencken continues, “These awful powers, of course, are not exercised against all citizens. The man of influence with the reigning politicians, the supporter of the prevailing delusions, and the adept hypocrite — these are seldom molested.” [Hillary Clinton is an excellent example of one who is not molested; she is shielded.] “But the man who finds himself in an unpopular minority is at the mercy of the Polizei [police], and the easiest way to get into such a minority is to speak out boldly for the Bill of Rights.” [One needs only to listen to talk radio, especially on shortwave and the Internet, to discover many people whom the government has victimized for speaking for the Bill of Rights. Also, many judges deny the defense appealing to the Bill of Rights.]
    The procedure operates as follows: “First an unpopular man is singled out for persecution, and then a diligent search is made, with the police and prosecuting officers and even the courts co-operating, for a law that he can be accused of breaking. The enormous multiplicity of sumptuary and inquisitorial statutes makes this quest easy. The prisoner begins his progress through the mill of justice under a vague accusation of disorderly conduct or disturbing the peace; he ends charged with crimes that carry staggering penalties.” [One cynical commentator claims that between the time the average person gets out of bed and eats breakfast, he has already committed five felonies. During the day, the average person probably commits several felonies and dozens of misdemeanors and even more civil infractions without knowing that he has committed a crime. The government has made a criminal of everyone, which makes imprisoning everyone who becomes a nuisance legally easy. To increase the likelihood of people violating a law, laws are often written to contradict other laws. Thus, by obey one law, the person has to disobey another law.] Making criminals of people “for merely thinking unpopular thoughts,” as many Puritans[, Yankees,] want to do today, is not new. Mencken comments on laws that outlawed unpopular thoughts. He writes, “Once he is accused of such heresy, the subsequent proceedings take on the character of a lynching. His constitutional rights are swept away as of no validity, and all the ancient rules of the Common Law — for example, those against double jeopardy and hearsay are suspended in order to fetch him. Many of the newer statutes actually suspend these safeguards formally, and though they are to that extent plainly unconstitutional, the higher courts have not interfered with their execution.” [This situation that Mencken abhors has gotten infinitely worse since he wrote. For example, double jeopardy appears in the application of many civil rights laws. If a White person is found not guilty of a crime against a Black person, then the U.S. government may file charges against the White person for violating the Black person’s civil rights. The White person is being charged with committing a crime of which he has been found innocent by merely changing the name of the crime.] He cites the Volstead Act as an example of a law that “destroys the constitutional right to a jury trial, and in its administration the constitutional prohibition of unreasonable searches and seizures and the rule against double jeopardy.” [The Volstead Act was the law that enforced the Eighteenth Amendment, the Prohibition Amendment. Much of the legislation enacted by Congress since 9-11 voids the Bill of Rights.] He continues, “The mob is always in favour of the prosecution, for the prosecution is giving the show. In the face of its applause, very few American judges have the courage to enforce the constitutional guarantees — and still fewer prosecuting attorneys.” [This explains the lack of popular support for the people who are persecuted and prosecuted for standing up for liberty and the inalienable rights guaranteed by the Constitution.]
    Furthermore, “a prosecuting attorney’s success depends very largely upon his ferocity. American practice permits him an extravagance of attack that would land him in jail, and perhaps even in a lunatic asylum, in any other country, and the more passionately he indulges in it the more certain becomes his promotion to higher office, including the judicial.” Judges who had previously been prosecuting attorneys “seem to be generally convinced that any man accused of crime is ipso facto guilty, and that if he is known to harbour political heresies he is guilty of a sort of blasphemy when he mentions his constitutional rights.” [An early television judge showed such bias and prejudice. Whenever someone appeared before him whom he thought was a “racist,” that person lost his case even if the evidence overwhelmingly supported his cause.]
    Mencken notes, “This doctrine that a man who stands in contempt of the prevailing idealogy has no rights under the law is so thoroughly democratic that in the United States it is seldom questioned, save by romantic fanatics, robbed of their wits by an uncritical reading of the Fathers.” [Mencken’s observation may be true of a true lover of liberty, a libertist, but it is not true of others. However, courts have gone out of their way to ensure that the rights of Communists and their allies who want to abolish all real liberties and convert the United States to totalitarianism are protected.]
    Next, Mencken remarks, “It is difficult, indeed, for democracy to reconcile itself to what may be called common decency. By this common decency I mean the habit, in the individual, of viewing with tolerance and charity the acts and ideas of other individuals — the habit which makes a man a reliable friend, a generous opponent, and a good citizen.” [One of the most amusing ironies in America today is that the people who preach tolerance and yell the loudest that we must all be tolerant are the most intolerant people in the country. What would one expect from a Puritan Yankee, to use a tautology?] Then Mencken adds, “The democrat, despite his strong opinion to the contrary, is seldom a good citizen. . . .His eagerness to bring all his fellow-citizens, and especially all those who are superior to him, into accord with his own dull and docile way of thinking, and to force it upon them when they resist, leads him inevitably into acts of unfairness, oppression and dishonour which, if all men were alike guilty of them, would quickly break down that mutual trust and confidence upon which the very structure of civilized society rests. Where democratic man is so firmly in possession of his theoretical rights that resistance to him is hopeless, as it is in large areas of the United States, he actually produces this disaster.” [Can one say “California?”] For “any well-informed and self-respecting man” living in such a community is almost impossible. Not accepting “the democratic epistemology and the Puritan ethic” of such communities, he is harassed until he flees.
    Continuing, Mencken explains the uneasiness in American life: “This irreconcilable antagonism between democratic Puritanism and common decency is probably responsible for the uneasiness and unhappiness that are so marked in American life, despite the great material prosperity of the United States. Theoretically, the American people should be happier than any other; actually, they are probably the least happy in Christendom. The trouble with them is that they do not trust one another — and without mutual trust there can be no ease, and no genuine happiness.” [Multiculturalism and multiracialism, both of which the Yankee has forced on the country, cause much of this distrust and the resulting unhappiness. As European countries have become more multicultural and multiracial, they too are suffering from distrust and the resulting unhappiness and uneasiness. People in monoracial and monocultural countries are more trusting of one another and, therefore, happier.] Mencken concludes, “The thing that makes life charming is not money, but the society of our fellow-men, and the thing that draws us toward our fellow-men is not admiration for their inner virtues, their hard striving to live according to the light that is in them, but admiration for their outer graces and decencies — in brief, confidence that they will always act generously and understandingly in their intercourse with us. We must trust men before we may enjoy them.” Then he remarks that “it is impossible to put any such trust in a Puritan. With the best intentions in the world he cannot rid himself of the delusion that his duty to save us from our sins — i.e., from the non-Puritanical acts that we delight in — is paramount to his duty to let us be happy in our own way. Thus he is unable to be tolerant, and with tolerance goes magnanimity. A Puritan cannot be magnanimous. He is constitutionally unable to grasp the notion that it is better to be decent than to be steadfast, or even than to be just.” Furthermore, the democrat “is simply a Puritan doubly damned.” [Mencken seems not to realize that “Puritan” and “Yankee” are synonymous. That is, a Puritan is a Yankee and a Yankee is a Puritan. Hillary Clinton is an excellent contemporary example of a Puritan Yankee.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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Mencken on the Democracy and Morality

Mencken on the Democracy and Morality

Thomas Allen

    In 1926, H. L. Mencken (1880-1956) wrote Notes on Democracy in which he expressed his views on democracy and related issues. He was a journalist, satirist, and critic and a libertarian and one of the leaders of the Old Right. In his book, he describes democracy and morality, pages 162-176. Below is an overview of his discussion on democracy and morality; my comments are in brackets.
    “Liberty gone, there remains the majestic phenomenon of democratic law.” A glance at the law is sufficient to reveal “the identity of democracy and Puritanism.” [Puritanism extends far beyond vice, which today is a minor part of Puritanism — drug laws, especially anti-tobacco laws, and, to a declining extent, the prohibition of prostitution being about the only aspects of this type of Puritanism remaining. Today, Puritanism appears mostly as political correctness, abortion, civil rights laws, laws controlling businesses, zoning laws, hostility toward Confederate monuments, hostility toward Christianity, and the like.] They are merely “different facets of the same gem. In the psyche they are one.” Both derive “their primal essence out of the inferior man’s fear and hatred of his betters, born of his observation that, for all his fine theories, they are stronger and of more courage then he is, and that as they go through this dreadful world they have a far better time.” [Although Mencken description of the inferior man fits many, if not, most Whites, it fits nearly all Blacks. Yet, the old Black man said that he was glad that he was Black instead of White because Blacks knew how to have a good time and Whites did not.] This fear and hatred lead to envy.
    Envy is not “a speciality of democratic man. It is the common possession of all men of the ignoble and incompetent sort, at all times and everywhere.” Nevertheless, democracy liberates it; “it is only under democracy that it is liberated; it is only under democracy that it becomes the philosophy of the state.” [Therefore, all democratic countries have evolved into a welfare-state, which is based and built on envy.]
    Although humanity owes the old autocracies a great debt, the democrat is not likely to remember that debt. About the old autocracies, Mencken writes, “Their service, perhaps, was a by-product of a purpose far afield, but it was a service none the less: they held the green fury of the mob in check, and so set free the spirit of superior man.” When Flavius Honorius collapsed, Europe fell into chaos for four hundred years. [Flavius Honorius {384 –423} was the Western Roman Emperor from 393 to 423.] Charlemagne revived the autocracy and made possible the Renaissance and the modern age. [Charlemagne {742 –814}, King of the Franks {768–814} and Emperor of the Romans {800-814} united much of Europe during the early Middle Ages.] The autocracies kept the mob “from the throat of civilization.”
    Mencken points to the French and Russian Revolutions to illustrate what happens when the autocracy collapses: “The instant such a catastrophe liberates the mob, it begins a war to the death upon superiority of every kind not only upon the kind that naturally attaches to autocracy, but even upon the kind that stands in opposition to it. The day after a successful revolution is a blue day for the late autocrat, but it is also a blue day for every other superior man.”
    Mencken continues, “Democracy, as a political scheme, may be defined as a device for releasing this hatred born of envy, and for giving it the force and dignity of law.” Moreover, “the democratic state, despite the contrary example of France, almost always shows a strong tendency to be also a Puritan state.” Especially, in the field of public law, Puritan legislation “is a thing of many grandiose pretensions and a few simple and ignoble realities. The Puritan . . . always tries to convince himself (and the rest of us) that it is grounded upon altruistic and evangelical motives — that its aim is to work the other fellow’s benefit against the other fellow’s will.” [This is true even after Puritanism abandoned the Bible, of which Mencken probably approved, and became a secular religion.]
    Mencken notes, “The Puritan’s actual motives are (a) to punish the other fellow for having a better time in the world, and (b) to bring the other fellow down to his own unhappy level. . . . Primarily, he is against every human act that he is incapable of himself.” [Mencken has just described the motives of the Yankee.] However, he notes, “The Puritan is surely no ascetic. Even in the great days of the New England theocracy it was impossible to restrain his libidinousness: his eyes rolled sideways at buxom wenches quite as often as they rolled upward to God. But he is incapable of sexual experience upon what may be called a civilized plane; it is impossible for him to manage the thing as a romantic adventure; in his hands it reduces itself to the terms of the barnyard. Hence the Mann Act.” [The Mann Act makes it a felony to engage in interstate or foreign commerce transport of people for the purpose of prostitution or illegal sexual acts.] Likewise, with an alcoholic beverage, the Puritan “can have experience of it only as a furtive transaction behind the door, with a dreadful headache to follow. Hence Prohibition.” [Every chance that Mencken gets to condemn Prohibition, he does so.] Also, “with the joys that come out of the fine arts. Looking at a picture, he sees only the model’s pudenda. Reading a book, he misses the ordeals and exaltations of the spirit, and remembers only the natural functions. Hence comstockery.” [Today, censorship appears in the form of political correctness and vulgar mobs preventing anyone with whom these low-lives disagree from speaking peacefully on college campuses. Now, books are seldom removed from libraries because of sexual content, most sexual content now being politically correct, but because of political content, i.e., the book is politically incorrect because it disagrees with democracy, liberalism, progressivism, socialism, communism, Marxism, or the ever-growing power of the government or is considered “racist.”]
    The Puritan’s “delight in his own rectitude is grounded upon a facile assumption that it is difficult to maintain that the other fellow, being deficient in God’s grace, is incapable of it. So he venerates himself, in the moral department, as an artist of unusual talents, a virtuoso of virtue.” Mencken continues, “His error consists in mistaking a weakness for a merit, an inferiority for a superiority.” Being moral in the Puritan sense “is not actually a sign of spiritual eminence; . . . it is simply a sign of docility, of lack of enterprise and originality, of cowardice.” Once the Puritan forgets “his mainly imaginary triumphs over the flesh and the devil, . . . [he] always turns out to be a poor stick of a man in brief, a natural democrat.” [Thus, Puritans and democrats are twins, and “Puritan” is merely another name for “Yankee.”]
    Mencken adds, “No Puritan has ever painted a picture worth looking at, or written a symphony worth hearing, or a poem worth reading — and I am not forgetting John Milton, who was not a Puritan at all, but a libertarian, which is the exact opposite. The whole Puritan literature is comprised in The Pilgrim’s Progress.” He continues, “Even in the department wherein the Puritan is most proud of himself, i.e., that of moral legislation, he has done only second- and third-rate work.” [Puritanism explains the low quality, meddlesome legislation flowing from Washington and most State capitals.] “His fine schemes for bringing his betters down to his own depressing level always turn out badly.”
    “Since the first uprising of the lower orders, the modern age has seen but one genuinely valuable contribution to moral legislation: . . . the Code Napoleon. It was concocted by a committee of violent anti-Puritans, and in the full tide of a bitter reaction against democracy.”
    Mencken continues, “If democracy had not lain implicit in Puritanism, Puritanism would have had to invent it. Each is necessary to the other. Democracy provides the machinery that Puritanism needs for the quick and ruthless execution of its preposterous inventions.” Puritans face great difficulty in advancing their schemes under autocracies. They can only convince the King if the King is crazy. Even then, the King’s ministers will restrain him. “But the mob is easy to convince, for what Puritanism has to say to it is mainly what it already believes: its politics is based upon the same brutal envies and quaking fears that lie under the Puritan ethic.” Continuing, Mencken notes that “the political machinery through which it [democracy] functions provides a ready means of translating such envies and fears into action. There is need only to sound the alarm and take a vote: the debate is over the moment the majority has spoken.” Thus, in democratic countries, “even the most strange and dubious legislative experiments are” enacted with ferocious haste. [Examples are Bush’s police state laws, which were mostly passed by Congress without anyone in Congress reading them and with little or no debate, and Obamacare, which Congress passed without reading or even knowing what was in it. Unfortunately, once enacted even the most egregious, intrusive, meddlesome, cumbersome, ineffective, inefficient laws are next to impossible to  repeal.]
    Mencken remarks “that this process of law-making by orgy, with fanatics supplying the motive-power and unconscionable knaves steering the machine, is bound to fill the statute-books with enactments that have no rational use or value save that of serving as instruments of psychopathological persecution and private revenge.” [And now you know why we have the laws that we do and so many of them.] Most laws “involve gross invasions of the most elementary rights of the free citizen, but they are popular with the mob because they have a virtuous smack and provide it with an endless succession of barbarous but thrilling shows.” Mostly, the victims of these laws are men whom “the mob naturally envies and hates — men of unusual intelligence and enterprise, men who regard their constitutional liberties seriously and are willing to go to some risk and expense to defend them. Such men are inevitably unpopular under democracy, for their qualities are qualities that the mob wholly lacks, and is uneasily conscious of  lacking: it thus delights in seeing them exposed to slander and oppression, and railroaded to prison.” [Although most members of the mob had never traded a stock, the mob was delighted when Martha Stewart went to prison.] Mencken notes that a district attorney is always ready to prosecute a superior man because “district attorneys are invariably men who aspire to higher office, and no more facile way to it is to be found than by assaulting and destroying a man above the general.” These are the type of district attorneys who become Congressmen. (One “is seldom promoted because he has been jealous of the liberties of the citizen.”) Furthermore, many judges reach “the bench by the same route.” [Most of the laws that Mencken uses as illustrations are petty, irritating laws. He seldom mentions the really despotic laws such as the wartime laws enacted during the Wilson administration that have been used since then to terrorize and imprison people who disagreed with the government. The laws that he mentions are nothing compared to today’s tax laws, which gather the mob’s support because they feed the mob’s envy: The mob is convinced that the tax laws are written to punish the rich and give the inferior man a free ride.]
    Mencken continues, “The whole criminal law in America thus acquires a flavour of fraud. It is constantly embellished and reinforced by fanatics who have discovered how easy it is to hurl missiles at their enemies and opponents from behind ranks of policemen. It is executed by law officers whose private prosperity runs in direct ratio to their reckless ferocity.” [If one listens to talk radio for a few days, especially on the shortwave and the Internet, he would discover the truthfulness of Mencken’s observation. He would discover that America has many political prisoners whose real crime, as opposed to the fraudulent crime of which they have been convicted with the aid of bias, prejudice judges, is that they stood for liberty.] Morons “whose chief delight lies in seeing their betters manhandled and humiliated” applaud this injustice. [Political cartoonists on the left are among the most idiotic of these morons.]
    “In the criminal courts a rich man not only enjoys none of the advantages that Liberals and other defenders of democracy constantly talk of; he is under very real and very heavy burdens.” Railroading a “better,” especially one who stands for liberty, is morally excusable. Sarcastically, Mencken asserts, “The district attorney is an altruist whose one dream is Law Enforcement; he cannot be terrified by the power of money; he is the spokesman of the virtuous masses against the godless and abominable classes.”
    Next, Mencken discusses Prohibition and the evils that it has brought instead of the paradise promised by its proponents. At the time that Mencken wrote, even the mob had turned against Prohibition, but its promoters refused to “repudiate their original nonsense.” [This sounds familiar. How many other laws are still being enforced that the mob has turned against? At least the mob got Prohibition repealed — and that required a constitutional amendment instead of a simple legislative enactment.] Prohibitionists are moved by “the psychological aberration called sadism. They lust to inflict inconvenience, discomfort, and, whenever possible, disgrace upon the persons they hate.” [We see this with other laws — probably all mala prohibita laws. {Mala prohibitum is an offense prohibited by statute, but not inherently evil or wrong, such as failure to submit a report or to have a permit or license, failure to pay taxes, and most traffic violations. They are wrong because the government declares to be wrong. Opposite of mala prohibitum is mala in se, which is an offense that is evil or wrong from its own nature, irrespective of a statute, such as murder, rape, or robbery. Basically, the difference between the two is that mala in se is what God prohibits and mala prohibitum is what man prohibits.}] Like Prohibition, such laws become a means to “badger and annoy everyone who” does not comply with the letter of the law or its spirit, whichever is the most oppressive. Such laws “fill the jails with men taken for purely artificial offences” [as the drug laws do today]. Most of all, such laws satisfy “the Puritan yearning to browbeat and injure, to torture and terrorize, to punish and humiliate all who show any sign of being happy.” Moreover, the Puritans can do this “with a safe line of policemen and judges in front of them; always they can do it without personal risk.” Freedom from personal risk is the secret of the Puritans’ continual frenzy.
    Mencken notes “the American mob, far from being lawless, is actually excessively tolerant of written laws and judicial fiats, however plainly they violate the fundamental rights of free men, and . . . this tolerance is sufficient to protect them [the Prohibitionists, Puritans, and other meddlesome busybodies] from what, in more liberal and enlightened countries, would be the natural consequences of their anti-social activity.  If they had to meet their victims face to face, there would be a different story to tell.” However, “they seldom encounter this embarrassment. Instead, they turn the officers of the law to the uses of their mania.” He continues, “Thus, under democracy, the normal, well-behaved, decent citizen — the Forgotten Man of the late William Graham Sumner — is beset from all sides, and every year sees an augmentation of his woes.” [Sumner {1840–1910} was a classical liberal, a libertarian, and an American social scientist.] “In order to satisfy the envy and hatred of his inferiors and the blood lust of a pack of irresponsible and unconscionable fanatics, few of them of any dignity as citizens or as men and many of them obviously hypocritical and corrupt, this decent citizen [the Forgotten Man] is converted into a criminal for performing acts that are natural to men of his class everywhere, and police and courts are degraded to the abhorrent office of punishing him for them.” [Although Mencken writes this about Prohibition, it is true of most mala prohibita laws.]
    [What Mencken has written about the Puritan could just as well have been written about the Yankee. Substituting “Yankee” for “Puritan” would not change the meaning of what Mencken has written. The two are synonymous.]

Copyright © 2017 by Thomas Coley Allen.

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